Green Low-Carbon Technology for Metalliferous Minerals

Metalliferous minerals play a central role in the global economy. They will continue to provide the raw materials we need for industrial processes. Significant challenges will likely emerge if the climate-driven green and low-carbon development transition of metalliferous mineral exploitation is not managed responsibly and sustainably. Green low-carbon technology is vital to promote the development of metalliferous mineral resources shifting from extensive and destructive mining to clean and energy-saving mining in future decades. Global mining scientists and engineers have conducted a lot of research in related fields, such as green mining, ecological mining, energy-saving mining, and mining solid waste recycling, and have achieved a great deal of innovative progress and achievements. This Special Issue intends to collect the latest developments in the green low-carbon mining field, written by well-known researchers who have contributed to the innovation of new technologies, process optimization methods, or energy-saving techniques in metalliferous minerals development

Film Noir as the Sovereign-Image of Empire: Cynicism, White Male Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Cinematic Apparatus

This dissertation develops a theory of film noir as sovereign-image, a meta-generic and meta-cinematic discourse that confronts the viewer with the biopolitical ambivalence of the cinematic apparatus but enjoins her to nonetheless affirm its normative use. I argue that classical American noir deploys a proto-neoliberal ideology to turn the indeterminacy at its core into a spectacle of victimized white men, offering emphatically gendered and racialized images of a pathological entrepreneur of the self who is not ashamed to exhibit his wounded private life as the source of his singular market value. I claim, however, that even in his fully developed contemporary form in which his classical predecessors trauma induced shamelessness turns into a cynically calculated affective display, noirs neoliberal hero is not the self-made man he appears to be but remains delegated by a homosocial group to be the sovereign arbiter of their lifes value for them, instead of them. As an individual whonot unlike the film vieweris temporarily isolated from his peers he is in the exceptional position to freely decide what kind of life to consider productive for the process of capital accumulation, turning his body into the arbitrary link between what Agamben calls bare life and a qualified form of lifea link I call the sovereign-image. I track the evolution of film noirs sovereign function alongside the expansion and transformation of the United States from a territorialized nation state to a deterritorialized global financial network (what Hardt and Negri call Empire) to shed light on how Hollywoods anomalous noir crisis, its war trauma induced state of exception, became the expression of the governing paradigm of unbridled global biocapitalism in the age of North Atlantic unilateralism. In contemporary neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Inception (2010), Fight Club (1999), or Drive (2011) becoming a self-made neoliberal subject coincides with gaining membership in a hybrid and flexible white male bios, the old-new flesh of Empire now cynically framed as the condition of possibility for autonomous selfhood as such. In critiquing neo-noirs cynical paradigm I demonstrate that its reactionary force can be mobilized only if the films first construct a biopolitical zone of indistinction where the inevitability of the western capitalo-patriarchal status quo is questioned and the equality of all forms of life is posited

The troubled relationship between architecture and aesthetic: exploring the self and emotional beauty in design

As its title informs us, this research has a double agenda: investigating the troubled relationship between architecture and its generated aesthetic since the early 1940s when the Self was repressed - the Eye and the ‘I’ - as well as exploring, through my test-bed project, a design process where feelings and emotions are an integral part. My research is an investigation into what seems to be a great paradox within architectural discourse. While good architecture or brilliant buildings tend to be judged by their capacity to produce an aesthetic experience, many architects claim they generate architecture in response to rational utilitarian issues, often insisting on removing themselves as personalities from the design process. This down-plays the direct relationship between personal judgement and visual discrimination, a position which has broader cultural implications. After a short decade (1977-88) of free imagination, lateral thinking and celebrating the Self, from the late 1980s the intellectualisation and further rationalisation of the architectural design process came again to the fore and became an authorial voice substituting the Self by introducing either philosophy, math or both to the design process. Investigating this troubled relationship took place alongside exploring the creation of an emotional environment within the architectural context; ways in which space becomes emotionally charged. G. Bachelard’s exposition of issues contained within poetry teaches us that like poetry, visual poetic images might release people into reverie, the state of mind in which the eidetic memory is accessed. The wonder and beauty of nature is a constant reminder of wonderful possibilities - with great relevance to architecture. My intention is not to depict or describe nature, but to evoke human emotions (as nature does) through the architectural spaces that I design. Using and evoking poetic images in the design process forming the preludes to emotive architecture. Spatial-Depth or Depth–Scape were two equivalent terms I coined for a new architectural spatial pursuit; it is the spatial-depth quality and effect that I explored which I believe is the aspect of my research that is a contribution to the field of architectural design. A new spatial concept and a new architectural language that substitutes the ubiquitous and already old Modern planar architecture. Opposed to the prevalent topological surface, with continuous and consistent skins, an exuberant ‘inside-out’, complex three dimensionally with an enhanced depth to be inhabited or involved with at close distance. A new spatial quality engulfed with emotional triggers such as the manifold silhouettes in the interactive time-cycled Light and Acoustic Installation - an emotional beauty. For architecture, aesthetics has the power to synthesise poetic and emotional values and at the same time give coherence to the design itself

Large bichromatic point sets admit empty monochromatic 4-gons

We consider a variation of a problem stated by Erd˝os and Szekeres in 1935 about the existence of a number fES(k) such that any set S of at least fES(k) points in general position in the plane has a subset of k points that are the vertices of a convex k-gon. In our setting the points of S are colored, and we say that a (not necessarily convex) spanned polygon is monochromatic if all its vertices have the same color. Moreover, a polygon is called empty if it does not contain any points of S in its interior. We show that any bichromatic set of n ≥ 5044 points in R2 in general position determines at least one empty, monochromatic quadrilateral (and thus linearly many).Postprint (published version